Echo Burning

elementary school,” he said. “I found out that elementary means easy. So ‘elementary school’ means ‘easy school.’ I remember thinking, well, it seems pretty hard to me. ‘Hard school’ would be a better name.”
    Ellie looked at him, seriously.
    “I don’t think it’s hard,” she said. “But maybe it’s harder in the ocean.”
    “Or maybe you’re smarter than me.”
    She thought about it, earnestly.
    “I’m smarter than some people,” she said. “Like Peggy. She’s still on the three-letter words. And she thinks you spell zoo with a Z.”
    Reacher had no answer to that. He waited for Carmen to pick it up, but before she could the waitress arrived back with a tin tray with three tall glasses on it. She put them on the table with great ceremony and whispered “Enjoy” to Ellie and backed away. But the glasses were almost a foot tall, and the drinking straws added another six inches, and Ellie’s chin was about level with the table top, so her mouth was a long way from where it needed to be.
    “You want me to hold it down?” Carmen asked her. “Or do you want to kneel up?”
    Ellie thought about it. Reacher was starting to wonder if this kid ever made a quick, easy decision. He saw a little of himself in her. He had taken things too seriously. The kids in every new school had made fun of him for it. But usually only once.
    “I’ll kneel up,” she said.
    It was more than kneeling. She stood on the vinyl bench in a kind of crouch, with her hands planted palms-down on the table around the base of the glass, and her head ducked to the straw. As good a method as any, Reacher figured. She started sucking her drink and he turned to look at his own. The ice cream was a round greasy spoonful. He found the cola way too sweet, like it was mixed from syrup in the wrong proportions. The bubbles were huge and artificial. It tasted awful. A long way from a childhood summer’s day in Germany.
    “Don’t you like it?” Ellie asked.
    Her mouth was full, and she sprayed a little of the mixture onto his sleeve.
    “I didn’t say anything.”
    “You’re making a funny face.”
    “Too sweet,” he said. “It’ll rot my teeth. Yours, too.”
    She came up with a huge grimace, like she was showing her teeth to a dentist.
    “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re all going to fall out anyway. Peggy’s got two out already.”
    Then she bent back to her straw and vacuumed up the restof the drink. She poked at the sludge in the bottom of the glass with her straw until it was liquid enough to suck.
    “I’ll finish yours, too, if you want,” she said.
    “No,” her mother said back. “You’ll throw up in the car.”
    “I won’t. I promise.”
    “No,” Carmen said again. “Now go to the bathroom, O.K.? It’s a long way home.”
    “I went already,” Ellie said. “We always go at school, last thing. We line up. We have to. The bus driver hates it if we pee on the seats.”
    Then she laughed delightedly.
    “Ellie,” her mother said.
    “Sorry, Mommy. But it’s only the boys who do that. I wouldn’t do it.”
    “Go again anyway, O.K.?”
    Ellie rolled her eyes theatrically and clambered over her mother’s lap and ran to the back of the diner. Reacher put a five over the check.
    “Great kid,” he said.
    “I think so,” Carmen said. “Well, most of the time.”
    “Smart as anything.”
    She nodded. “Smarter than me, that’s for sure.”
    He let that one go, too. Just sat in silence and watched her eyes cloud over.
    “Thanks for the sodas,” she said.
    He shrugged. “My pleasure. And a new experience. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a soda for a kid before.”
    “So you don’t have any of your own, obviously.”
    “Never even got close.”
    “No nieces or nephews? No little cousins?”
    He shook his head.
    “I was a kid myself,” he said. “Once upon a time, and a long time ago. Apart from what I remember about that, I don’t know too much about it.”
    “Stick around a day or two and Ellie will teach you more than you ever wanted to know. As you’ve probably guessed.”
    Then she looked beyond his shoulder and he heard Ellie’s footsteps behind him. The floor was old and there wereobviously air pockets trapped under the buckled linoleum because her shoes made hollow slapping sounds.
    “Mom, let’s go, ” she said.
    “Mr. Reacher is coming, too,” Carmen said. “He’s going to work with the horses.”
    He got up out of the booth and saw her watching